On Wed, 05 Jan 2011 15:26:24 +0100, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
wrote:
> On 01/05/2011 08:31 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>> On Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:15:20 +0100, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
>> wrote:
>>> Meanwhile, there is clear value in degrading gracefully by serving the
>>> same content as text/html to clients that don't support
>>> application/xhtml+xml, even if such clients don't get the benefit of
>>> the full functionality.
>>
>> But soon all browsers will support XHTML.
>
> Define "soon". Define "all". Heck, define "browser" as the use cases I
> proposed[1] deal with feed readers. Many of which attack HTML with
> regular expressions. Including, embarrassingly enough, one of the very
> libraries that Planet Venus depends on[2].
>
>> Internet Explorer not supporting XHTML was a problem for people wishing
>> to use XHTML. But that is being solved. What other problem is there? (I
>> would say, that XHTML is too hard, but that is not being debated.)
>
> I don't recommend to people that they serve XHTML unless they have a
> compelling reason to do so; but for those that do, I recommend
> constructing the XHTML in such a way that it can be parsed correctly as
> HTML unless there is a compelling reason not to.
>
> I've given my reason in the form of a use case. One that I will point
> out is not atypical or hypothetical. Can either you or Henri give any
> rationale for your pushing back on this?
I think that resources need to be processed unambiguously. Having
resources processed sometimes as XML and sometimes as HTML depending on
the user agent is very fragile and does not lead to interoperability. In
fact, I think will lead to divergence (localized perhaps). I.e. authors
not aware of this happening will optimize for their user agent of choice
(likely the market leader) and e.g. use features exclusively to HTML or
XML. (This has happened before. The difference was that instead of XML and
HTML you had IE-flavored HTML and Netscape-flavored HTML.)
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-xml/2011Jan/0025.html
> [2] http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/12/30/Dealing-with-HTML-in-Feeds
--
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/